Do You Love Me: A love letter to Beirut in fragments

Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me paints the story of Beirut. Composed entirely of archival footage drawn from more than 70 years of Lebanese film, television, home videos, music, and photography, the documentary resists narration, chronology, and explanation. Instead, it assembles memory the way it is lived in Lebanon: unevenly, emotionally, and without resolution.

Premiering at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 as part of Giornate degli Autori, Do You Love Me has since travelled widely on the international festival circuit.

Memory over history

The film moves freely across decades, folding weddings into bombed streets, seaside afternoons into televised air raids, moments of intimacy into scenes of rupture. Lebanon’s civil war, Israel’s repeated invasions, and cycles of destruction surface as recurring conditions, always present, never fully past.

Despite its intimacy, the film avoids anchoring itself in a personal narrative. Daher has been clear that she was never interested in telling her own story in isolation. The emotions running through the film, fear, affection, longing, exhaustion, are hers, but also deeply shared.

Violence without spectacle

Although Do You Love Me is saturated with images shaped by war and collapse, it avoids graphic depictions of violence. This restraint, developed in close collaboration with editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji, reflects an ethical refusal to turn suffering into spectacle.

Instead of showing death, the film lets destruction speak through hollowed buildings, interrupted routines, and the quiet persistence of daily life. Music plays a crucial role in this balance. Lebanese and international songs drift through the footage, carrying decades of emotional memory without tipping into nostalgia.

One exhilarating sequence unfolds to Dalida’s Laissez-Moi Danser, layered over scenes of dancing, both staged and spontaneous, before cutting abruptly to a garbage dump. The edit is playful, jarring, and deeply Lebanese: joy followed immediately by reality, without apology.

A question that never settles

At its core, Do You Love Me circles a tension familiar to generations of Lebanese: the desire to leave alongside the impossibility of detaching. Rather than resolve this contradiction, the film accepts it as a condition that persists precisely because it has never been resolved.

At the ICA, Do You Love Me arrives as a demanding invitation, to sit with memory rather than master it, to resist erasure without pretending coherence is possible. The film offers no answers, only a shared act of listening, returning again and again to the question that gives it its name.